Inside the bizarre world of animal espionage.

Earlier this month a stork was arrested in Egypt on suspicion of spying. The apparent spy devices were in fact monitoring equipment geologists had attached to the bird to track its migration path, but sadly the suspected spy never received a fair trial. Instead it was killed and eaten[3] by villagers, which no doubt sent out a powerful message to other feathered agents.

It isn’t the only bird to have fallen fowl (sorry) of the law. One eagle[4] was arrested in Sudan last year, and a vulture[5] was detained in Saudi Arabia in 2011, both on suspicion of being Israeli spies. As with the stork, they had been electronically tagged by scientists. In India, a pigeon[6] was arrested for spying for Pakistan in 2010. The pigeon fared much better than the spy stork, as it was reportedly given its own air-conditioned cell.

In 2010 Egypt blamed a series of shark attacks[7] on the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, claiming it had deliberately introduced man-eating sharks to damage Egypt’s tourist industry.

While sharks are in cahoots with Israelis, squirrels are the preferred weapon of choice for the British intelligence services – or so the Iranians believed when they arrested 14 spy squirrels[8].

Animals can be criminal masterminds, too. In Nigeria in 2009, a goat was arrested[9] for armed robbery. Police detained the goat after it was claimed the creature was in fact an armed robber, who had used black magic to transform himself into an animal after stealing a Mazda.